Only the Top Stories on the Net.

Archive

Tag Archives: Windows Phone

This is a strange one: apparently, Microsoft is looking to hire “highly motivated, extremely intelligent, and deeply technical people” in order to build a “core location service platform”.

The timing is a little bit off: Microsoft has beenaccused of tracking location without the user’s permission and has issued a response. In the light of these events it is not really clever to look for people in order to facilitate and create a “service to find the location of every Windows Phone device in the world, either by assisting GPS, or by using signal-analysis techniques to compute location where GPS cannot”.

Here’s the complete job description before it got pulled: “The team is looking for highly motivated, extremely intelligent, and deeply technical people to build the core location service platform. We are tasked with delivering a highly scalable service to find the location of every Windows Phone device in the world, either by assisting GPS, or by using signal-analysis techniques to compute location where GPS cannot. You will work closely with MSR and other research groups to improve our algorithms for mining large amounts of data using Bayesian analysis and other machine learning techniques. We have incredibly hard problems to solve in the coming year such as solving the indoor positioning problem as well as motion detection and relevance based positioning.”

Needless to say that the job posting, which went up today, has been already pulled. Microsoft is already able to track the location of Windows Phones for its Find My Phone service which does, of course, need the users approval in order to collect data. Either Redmond is looking to improve the already existing service or is into something different which will probably make huge waves.